Red and yellow and pink and green........

I've never understood it, unless you're a designer/architect type, why would you use colour on your CV? Controversial opinion warning but....... are you a school child? Are you apply for a job that has asked you to use colours? No? STOP IT THEN!

I think the main issue with colours in a CV for me is that it's juvenile.  As I said, unless you're a designer type or architect and you're demonstrating your skill in your CV , which by the way is perfectly acceptable and can look very skillful when done well, you don't need colours.

Here are some great examples of design CVs,  so clever.

http://theultralinx.com/2012/07/creative-graphic-design-resume-cv/

People seem to use them to highlight information but it's really not needed, here's a list of alternatives;

Use skilled presentation and your words to highlight important information.
Keep headings consistent, using the same fonts and font sizes.
Keep your paragraphs short.
Use bullets but only when you need to.

These tips will help you present yourself to an employer in a clear concise manner and make your document easier to read and therefore more likely to be placed in the YES pile.

So I've got that off my chest now, I'm feeling lighter!

Check, check, checkedy, check, check!

Yes I made up the word 'checkedy' but so what, you should see some of the howlers I've encountered in my time. One of the best would be an applicant applying to a mechanical engineering role who misspelled mechanical!

You really can never check your document too many times, well you can actually, if you do it too many times you'll probably overlook some errors so it's best to get at least one other person, better two, to have a look over it as well. They don't have to understand it, just look for grammatical and spelling errors, you've no idea how off putting it is to a recruiter when a candidate clearly hasn't been bothered to take the time to make sure all is right, it's likely to mean your document ends up in the B file (bin) so don't take the chance and checkedy check check!

Have a look at these links for some facepalm worthy mistakes.

http://www.totaljobs.com/careers-advice/cvs-and-applications/funny-cv-mistakes-bloopers

http://www.responsewebrecruitment.co.uk/blog/100-funniest-things-weve-read-in-a-cv/

This is my favorite, an infographic from @socialtalent

http://www.socialtalent.co/blog/funny-cv-mistakes

It's all in the presentation

Have you got a CV, do you underline your titles, do you use different fonts, have you used italics, what about font sizes, have you varied them, do you use boarders, how about random bullet lists, are you using colours..........?

WELL STOP!

Presentation is very important when writing a CV and here's the one reason why;

IT'S THE FIRST THING AN EMPLOYER SEES

Before they've even read one word on your CV, if you've got different fonts, boarders, italics and (heaven forbid) colours all over the place, you're not making a very good first impression.

Its always best to keep it simple so here are my top tips;

1- Choose a font and stick with it. You can change a font size or bold it out for titles, you don't ever need more than one font.

2- Choose a style and stick with it. By this I mean decide how you want to present the whole CV and use that throughout, for example, if you want to bold and underline all your titles you need to do that for every single one not just the main titles.

3- Ditch the boarders. I've always been baffled as to why people do this, you don't need to put your CV in boxed sections, it doesn't look neater, it looks juvenille.

4- Ditch the colours. See above but instead of juvenille, think infantile!!

5- If using bullets in your role descriptions then use bullets for all roles not just one or two, where you don't have enough info to include a bullet list that's fine but if that's the style you want to use, use it throughout.

6- Make sure spacing is consistent. Paragraphs spacing should always be the same throughout the document.

I could go on but that's all for now, if you're stuck, get in touch for a free consultation to see how we could help.